I'm sure you've all heard this question from Bush defenders: "How many people have died from terrorist attacks since 9/11?"
My reply to them is: "You're asking the wrong question. The right question is: Since Clinton told Bush in their transition meeting that Al Qaida would be his top foreign policy problem, since Clinton's NSC advisor Sandy Berger personally told the incoming NSC staffers that AL Qaida had to be dealt with, since Richard Clarke was cut out of principals' meetings at the Bush White House, and his constant warnings about Al Qaida went unheeded, since George Tenet called on Condi Rice with a short-notice appointment to emphasize his concern that nothing was being done at White House level about Bin Laden, since the PDB of August 6th 2001 warned of an impending Al Qaida attack, since a CIA analyst made a trip to Crawford to give an in person briefing to Bush warning of an attack by Bin Laden, and in response to all these warnings Bush did nothing - since then, how many people have died in this country from terrorist attacks?"
As a corollary to my question above, I have long believed that if Al Gore had been able to assume the presidency to which he was elected on 2001, he would have taken action that would have forestalled the 9/11 attack. Last year, I was fortunate to meet - well, let me just call him X, as it was a private conversation, he is still prominent in Washington counter-terrorism circles, and probably would not want his private comments to be fodder for personal attacks from the wingnut community. I'll just say that this person has written extensively about Al Qaida and the jihadist threat, and was in a position to be familiar with the operation of the Clinton NSC.
I asked X whether he thought if Gore had been president, 9/11 may not have happened. He said that yes, there was a good possibility, because i) Gore as vice president had been very focused on issues of terrorism, and ii) in the face of the numerous warnings coming in, he would have done the same as he and Clinton had done at the time of the millennium threat: set up a White House situation room, and sent out to all agencies for daily action reports. As we now know that there was enough information scattered out there in various agencies that would have enabled us to forestall 9/11 if the NSC had been doing its job and had acted as a center of operations, so indeed there was a good chance that 9/11 would not have happened if Gore had been president.
There's no certainty, of course - just a high probability.
Bush and the Repubs have had a free ride from the press on his "I'm more tough on terrorism" trope for too long. It's time the alternative view - that we could have avoided 9/11 if Democrats had been running things - to get out as part of the national discussion. I hope all readers of this diary will do what they can to spread this statement of fact (as I see it) as widely as they can.